Do you remember my post from Monday about the price change notification
text I got from Vodafone? The text included a non-functional URL which, I
thought, was a little inconvenient as I wasn't able to see what prices
were changing.

Well, it didn't matter anyway! That's because the company has, it seems,
changed its mind. Or made a dramatic U-turn.

Here's the message they sent today:

From Vodafone UK. On Monday you received a text about price
changes. The changes have been put on hold. We'll contact you when we have
an update

Interesting, eh? I wonder what the back-story on this is.

This morning is all about RIM. Today there's a media event to which the
world's press (well, the UK lot, anyway) are invited. The expectation is
that RIM will be launching some new hardware. Bring it on.

I won't be surprised to see a few services chucked in there but the focus
should hopefully be hardware.

And boy does RIM need new hardware. The BlackBerry-dedicated news sites
have been traumatised of late in this regard. Only a few weeks ago, a
rather poorly worded tweet from @BlackBerry seemed to be announcing
three new devices. Even the mainstream media picked it up. Alas, it was
about something completely different.

I think it's fair to say that we've been starved of RIM hardware news.
Yes, the 9900 looks absolutely fantastic -- and we know that's coming.
But, have you got anything else for us, RIM?

Here's hoping. I will be tweeting away with updates this morning from @ew4n.

So last week I was having a good time with Vodafone. This morning I got this comparatively useless text to let me know that 'prices are changing'.

This is really good -- a text update, I will obviously read it -- but the call-to-action? Visit some site that isn't even linkable from my phone browser? Who composed this text? Don't you think I'm likely to want to click-through? And when I do click-through, by actually arsing around with selecting/cutting/pasting the address into the browser, will the page render for a mobile browser? Probably not.

Let me see.

I'll have a look.

Are you a betting reader? 

;-)

I looked. I typed the URL into the BlackBerry browser and got a glorious, 'Sorry, the page you are looking for has not been found.'

Oh dear.

I tried it just now on the desktop browser: I get the same error.

So that's not very useful at all. You'd think that these things get triple-checked before they go out. You know, serious people wearing serious suits, frowning a lot, repeatedly testing stuff? Lots of checklists and perhaps even some kind of user-testing firm on speed-dial to do a quick series of external tests? All to make sure that when the customer gets the message, they actually understand it. And can act upon it.

It does seem to me that Vodafone's text message marketing is a bit strange -- check out this rather cryptic roaming data billing notification I got a little while ago.

For all I know right now, this text might have been notification that Vodafone is increasing their prices by 400%.